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Some of my thoughts...........
DIT, Government of India has included the provision of subsidy of Rs.3, 000 to VLEs, as a viability gap funding, because of the unavailability of government services in the initial months. But this has not translated into a smart move in Tamilnadu, since the private bidders, mesmerized by the lucrative Request For Proposal (RFP), and with assumptions of making money immediately after setting up these centres, rejected the subsidy amount at the time of bidding and had even gone to the extent of making their bids in negative. Now, after being the Implementing Agency, the private player has a strong feeling that it may not be a viable business, with the existing situations. Resultantly, the enthusiasm with which they entered into CSCs has faded and this has made the implementation & sustainability rate of CSCs considerably slow. Due to this the VLEs who comes under 3i-Infotech jurdisction, has to bear the brunt.
A live example of this can be found in AP. Out of three bidders for CSC, CMS made its bid at zero. 3i Infotech went many steps ahead and made its bid in negative, precisely, - which means that the company would be paying to the government Rs.351 per centre. Now the situation is that already 3i Infotech is out of the CSC project in the state. Now exactly similar situation prevails in Tamilnadu also.
Need of the hour is specific bouquet of B2C services:
A year after signing of deal, the stakeholders are increasingly realizing that a solution can be a bouquet of services (especially B2C, given the fact that even in coming months there are doubts if the government services will be made available to these centres), improvised according to the local needs and necessities of the people, if the centres have to be made viable.
The other implementing agency in Tamilnadu is coming up with such services, which can be bundled with these centres to make it viable.
There is no dearth of examples of bundling B2C services to CSCs in many parts of the country. Like in Palamau district of Jharkhand, the Deputy Commissioner has utilized the centres in the election times, for making videos and appointing the operators as civil monitors of the elections campaigns.
In our Tamilnadu also, recently Election Commission has issued a G.O, which enables the CSCs, to act as the front end agents for the citizen's name inclusion/deletion/capturing photo images in the electoral roll, and other related services thro on-line.
Gujarat is another place where e-Kiosks set up by dairy authorities, popular as Dairy Information Service Kiosk (DISK) have been used to sell milks and have an up to date account of the sales, reducing time of the each farmer in selling to these centres and people purchasing milks at reasonable rates to these centres. Earlier the queue of people coming for purchasing purpose was longer, but after the setting up of thousands of kiosk, the queue of farmers selling milk to these centres increased and queue for purchasing decreased with speedy and fair business. Similar things can be done anywhere, viewing the local needs of the people.
More recently, NREGS works have been entrusted by the CSCs by the Government of India, and the same is yet to be introduced in Tamilnadu.
The potential of an ICT enabled kiosk in providing employment, business, education, services, information on health and agriculture are quite apparent and huge. But this can not be realized until issues surrounding CSCs like - lack of understanding of this project by both the implementing Agency and the VLEs, lack of will in e-Enabling the processes in government departments; unavailability of need specific B2C services, and lack of awareness about the ICT concept - and more importantly lack of viability gap funding to the VLEs– are resolved.
Will post more.....
k. Gurunathan
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